Project Ideas

Mobile Posting

In an effort to make online neighborhood dialog more accessible, we are looking to create a great posting experience for our mobile users. We are especially interested in making the process of posting a photo from a mobile device as smooth as possible.

In this project, you will implement a front end that easily allows users to make a post from their mobile device. The frontend should be optimized to look good and function well on a smartphone, and should have the specific purposes of allowing a user to select which group to post to, select which thread to post to (or a new thread), author a post, add a photo from their device's storage or camera (if they choose), and submit the post/photo.

The initial version of this front end will be developed using HTML 5 and Javascript. After developing this page, OS specific apps might be developed that rely heavily on the webpage. The goal of the OS apps is to allow a user to delay transmitting their post until they are on a wifi network, and add Post to E-Democracy as an option to the OS photo shareing menu.

See Mobile App for a more thorough description of this idea and its background.

Extracting Evaluation Data

Like any other organization, we need to make decisions based on data. There is quite a bit of data stored in the E-Democracy platform about how our users interact with the platform and each other. However, most of this data is not currently accessible outside of database queries. This means that a lot of this data is not available for decision making. A module that makes it easy to request data about our dozens of groups or thousands of members would be hugely valuable to our staff and researchers.

In this project, you will implement the View and Controller portions of a module that retrieves data about the groups, topics, posts, and users of E-Democracy. This module will allow a user to set boundaries on the data retrieved (e.g. posts in certain groups over a certain month) and will provide the user with a CSV for download. Time permitted, an API can be created to export this data in JSON for consumption by other programs, and a simple data preview display can be created.

For more information on the broader evaluation project that this is a part of, see Evaluation Dashboard

GroupServer API

There is a lot of content available on E-Democracy, and a lot of potential uses of E-Democracy as a communications platform across devices and platforms. However, the platform that E-Democracy is built on does not provide an API for accessing or interacting with groups, topics, and posts.

This project overlaps a bit with the Extracting Evaluation Data project, except that it focuses on the content of groups/topics/posts/users, and is solely concerned with creating an API.

Web and VoIP Blockclub Prototype

Skills Needed or Learned: Drupal; MyVoxBox; VoIP Implementation; Git

We have a dream that neighbors should be able to share community and emergency information on whatever technology they are most comfortable with. Imagine a service where your neighbor could call a number and record a message for her nearest 50 neighbors. Then you could listen to her message on a website, and respond via a text message.